Patrick Collison

New from @arcinstitute: using the latent space representation of genomes from single-cell life to find new candidate functional RNAs. I think this is cool because: (1) it uses deep learning and model interpretability to productive ends on a totally different kind of "knowledge"; (2) it shows how agents may be able to accelerate discovery in vast combinatoric spaces; and (3) it's an example of the synergy we'll hopefully see in the coming years between computational techniques and wet lab biology.

Ben has for many years been the best analyst in tech. I’m very much looking forward to this new @stratechery + @stripe partnership. stratechery.com/2026/presented…

These days, I'm struck by how the dominant mood on both sides of the Atlantic toward the other is a kind of pity. Europe frets about the US's supposed slide into autocracy; the US about Europe's pusillanimity and immiseration.

Excellent report on the NSF from Matt Faherty: newscience.org/nsf/. I wish there were more deep investigations and assessments like this of government agencies in the US, the EU, and elsewhere.

These days, I'm struck by how the dominant mood on both sides of the Atlantic toward the other is a kind of pity. Europe frets about the US's supposed slide into autocracy; the US about Europe's immiseration.

I very highly recommend visiting the UK's great cathedrals, e.g. Lincoln and Durham. I did so earlier this year and find myself reminiscing about them quite frequently. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy now facilitates nearly $25B of monthly transaction volume. @tryramp, @Deel, @Klarna, @felixpago, @HyperliquidX, and thousands of other businesses are building embedded banking functionality on Privy. At Stripe, we're deeply integrating Privy into Treasury, @Link, and Connect. In each case, it's accelerating our global expansion, and enabling us to build better functionality faster. (Coming soon: @Link balances.) We're also seeing that Privy's wallet infrastructure is the ideal substrate for agents to transact and earn -- live today with @merit_systems, @orthogonal_sh, @Nevermined_ai, @prlnet, and more. Developers prefer programmable financial infrastructure, but agents need it. We expect that the agentic economy will continue to grow extremely quickly. The Privy team has maintained remarkable product velocity, with major launches this year including deposit addresses, earning on Privy balances, digital asset accounts, custodial wallets, and Stripe's own stablecoin cards. It's also been neat to see how Privy has been accelerated by Stripe, with better onramps, @stablecoin payment rails and licenses, Stripe's fiat capabilities and issuing stack, and integration with @Tempo. Together, we're building one API for holding stablecoin balances and earning yield, moving money in and out of fiat, and orchestrating spend with cards. We still have a lot of work to do, not least in integrating everything across Privy, Bridge, and the rest of Stripe -- there's been so much feature and functionality expansion that we haven't yet had much time to reconcile everything. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how things are going, and excited by where these capabilities are headed. If you're interested in working on the future of stablecoins, agentic payments, and crypto's deployment in the real world, you should get in touch with @sternhenri (now leading all of @StripeCrypto) or others on the team.

Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy now facilitates nearly $25B of monthly transaction volume. @Ramp, @Deel, @Klarna, @felixpago, @HyperliquidX, and thousands of other businesses are building embedded banking functionality on Privy. At Stripe, we're deeply integrating Privy into Treasury, @Link, and Connect. In each case, it's accelerating our global expansion, and enabling us to build better functionality faster. (Coming soon: @Link balances.) We're also seeing that Privy's wallet infrastructure is the ideal substrate for agents to transact and earn -- live today with @merit_systems, @orthogonal_sh, @Nevermined_ai, @prlnet, and more. Developers prefer programmable financial infrastructure, but agents need it. We expect that the agentic economy will continue to grow extremely quickly. The Privy team has maintained remarkable product velocity, with major launches this year including deposit addresses, earning on Privy balances, digital asset accounts, custodial wallets, and Stripe's own stablecoin cards. It's also been neat to see how Privy has been accelerated by Stripe, with better onramps, @stablecoin payment rails and licenses, Stripe's fiat capabilities and issuing stack, and integration with @Tempo. Together, we're building one API for holding stablecoin balances and earning yield, moving money in and out of fiat, and orchestrating spend with cards. We still have a lot of work to do, not least in integrating everything across Privy, Bridge, and the rest of Stripe -- there's been so much feature and functionality expansion that we haven't yet had much time to reconcile everything. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how things are going, and excited by where these capabilities are headed. If you're interested in working on the future of stablecoins, agentic payments, and crypto's deployment in the real world, you should get in touch with @sternhenri (now leading all of @StripeCrypto) or others on the team.

Stablecoin-backed cards make make global balances instantly usable at 100M+ businesses. We're looking forward to working with @plasma to advance the space.

New from @stripepress: the definitive guide to sales. I notice that startups today are scaling sales faster than ever, making it more valuable to get structures and incentives right from the outset.

I’m very biased, but the new @WorksInProgMag is IMO a masterpiece in both design and content. worksinprogress.co/print/

Brothers Karamazov was Einstein’s favorite novel, a verdict he shared with Freud, Hillary Clinton, and Murakami. Dostoyevsky was Pope Francis’s favorite author. Indeed, he approvingly quoted Elder Zosima; perhaps an interesting case of art molding life. At the risk of betraying my relative shallowness and inferiority, I confess that I did not love it. Written in the shadow of the death of Dostoyevsky’s son (also Alyosha), and, more broadly, after a life of repeated tragedy, Karamazov attempts most of all to address the problem of evil in Christianity. Ivan presents a trenchant argument, asking how the suffering of children may possibly be explained given the existence of a supposedly benevolent God (Dostoyevsky collected real court cases for Ivan), culminating in Ivan’s famous return of the ticket. The book gives some sense for how dislocating the nineteenth century must have been. The ascendant authority of science, the spread of materialist philosophy, the doctrine of evolution, the aftermath of the French revolution and its supposedly enlightened empiricism: in Karamazov, we get the feeling that finding some kind of consilience wasn’t just an abstract philosophical challenge, but a source of intense spiritual torment. If inherited tradition is no longer an adequate basis for faith, why would we rationally cleave to an apparently irrational theology? All of this was in the air: it was only two years later that Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Perhaps demonstrating the utility of the novel as a medium, Dostoyevsky does not even attempt to solve the problem, but merely to illustrate a response, showing how individuals (Alyosha, Elder Zosima) may in the face of the inherent injustice present in the world nonetheless pursue lives of benevolence and charity: theodicy-by-example. In so doing, Dostoyevsky tacitly concedes that none of the teetering justifications expounded over the centuries can actually survive critical pressure and be defended through pure logic. Ultimately, though, I don’t find myself being fully compelled by Dostoyevsky’s characterization of the problem or his proposed solution. As another sprawling confrontation with and attempt to reconcile the problem of evil, Grossman’s Life and Fate is maybe a useful counterpoint. Unlike Karamazov, Life and Fate shows actual people confronting great wickedness. Ikonnikov, a small but important figure, is ordered to help in the construction of a gas chamber. He refuses, with full awareness of the consequences that will ensue. The Karamazovs, by contrast, live middle class lives unvisited by greater events. Ivan has money, education, and leisure; his torment is the invention of his own mind and thus a kind of self-indulgence. Even Alyosha, the novel’s most sympathetic character, is never tested. His crisis is spiritual: there is a slightly comic kerfuffle about Zosima’s noisome corpse, which challenges his faith, but no circumstance requires him to stake his life or even his comfort. Thus, a fundamental issue with Karamazov is that the problems of the book are on some level fake: they’re the self-inflicted derangements of febrile and dysregulated men. How much can or should we learn from the insane? To be charitable to Dostoyevsky, we might say that he understood the spiritual dislocation of the era that later gives rise to the larger evils of totalitarianism in the twentieth, even prefiguring them in the Grand Inquisitor. (Dostoyevsky explored this theme in greater detail a few years earlier in Demons.) Camus in 1959: “The real nineteenth century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.” In this interpretation, the problems in Karamazov set the stage for those in Life and Fate. Maybe. At least as a work of art, I’m not sure that this anticipation is enough to make the book stand on its own. In Karamazov, one continually wonders why the brothers don’t just pull it together. Dostoyevsky seems to transpose his own inner depths and spiritual torment onto his characters, but most people are not tortured writers, and it does not feel that the unhingedness of the characters is ever fully earned. In attempting to address evil, Grossman’s conclusion is ostensibly similar to Dostoyevsky’s: the only resolution lies in senseless kindness. For Dostoyevsky, this message is embodied in Alyosha, who represents a kind of fervent innocence. For me, however, it’s not clear that Alyosha ever fathoms the realities and extremities of evil, and hence he’s not fully persuasive: does he even reckon with the misdeeds of his brothers? Grossman is willing to engage head on. Far beyond gruesome newspaper anecdotes or neurotic and volatile siblings, Ikonnikov directly experiences the Holodomor in Ukraine and then the murders of the Jews. He has no patience for the kind of revolutionary ideas that animated Ivan’s contemporaries: “whenever we see [the dawn of an eternal good], the blood of old people and children is always shed.” Alyosha believes in the Church and is willing to set aside its failures to address suffering. The book closes on his declaration that all shall rise again. That is, Alyosha does not accept the tragedy of Ilyusha, an innocent boy’s death, but rather seeks to deny and escape it. “We shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened.” Life and Fate flatly rejects providential resolution. The heavens may be empty, and there is no greater meaning in evil. We can simply choose (freedom the other great theme of Life and Fate) to pursue acts of charity, generosity, and comfort: “Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.” These acts don’t ennoble the suffering but are instead justified on their own terms. Such altruism cannot become a catechism, as clearly lies in Alyosha’s destiny (and Karamazov was planned before Dostoyevsky's death as the first of two works); instead, our kindness must be senseless. And we should presume no salvation in adherence: Alyosha imagines a kind of sacred tutelage, but Ikonnikov is unceremoniously shot. Karamazov doesn’t show true evil, and Dostoyevsky’s solution, such as it is, involves a kind of denial, or at least evasion through metaphysics. Grossman saw it directly, and instead argues, humanistically, that we should be kind just because. — If Dostoyevsky came to his works by trying to understand and depict Russian society, they in turn became tapestries for others to understand national souls. In the aftermath of WWI, Russia was the great power defined in opposition to the West. As Germany tried to rediscover its own soul in the wreckage of defeat, it looked east to Russia, and frequently to Dostoyevsky himself. Carl Jung thought that the German people had a kind of Karamazovian quality. In particular, he believed that Christianity had disciplined them without fully transforming the impulses beneath their ostensibly civilized conduct: the “Germanic barbarian” was divided into upper and lower halves. Religion had domesticated the former while leaving the latter untamed. Waning faith consequently threatened to release forces that its authority had long restrained: “As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. When this happens in the individual it brings about a psychological revolution, but it can also take a social form.” Dostoyevsky was reputedly invoked on a weekly basis at Max Weber’s Sunday gatherings. At the beginning of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann’s later-repudiated 1918 nationalist polemic, he quotes approvingly Dostoyevsky’s characterization of Germany as the “protesting Western empire”, never quite adopting or feeling at home with the inheritance of Rome. In the same year, Spengler wrote Decline of the West, and explicitly perceived in Russia a youthful vigor, primitiveness, and irrationality that contrasted with the senile high culture of the German and Western worlds. In Magic Mountain, Mann later used Clavdia Chauchat to personify the seductive dangers of Eastern (i.e. Russian) illogic. Hermann Hesse declared that, for all their differences, Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha are actually all of one type; the Russian man. In them, he perceived that “the ideal of the Karamazov, primeval, Asiatic, and occult, is already beginning to consume the European soul”, which was leading to the downfall of Europe. In Hesse’s conception, the Russian man rejects inherited ethics and morals, and even beneficent Alyosha represents an “amoral impartiality.” Man is, Hesse says, halfway between animals and higher consciousness; the former restrained through the process of civilization and domestication. The Karamazovs represent the fraying of the ties. Hesse proceeds, ominously, to notice that the Germans in particular are more vulnerable than any European people to the temptations of “all those evils which one may regard in different ways, but which collectively signify the Karamazov.” While he was prescient in anticipating some of what would follow, he was in the end too sanguine in his hope that the spiritual dislocation could remain limited to that. “It is possible that the whole Downfall of Europe will play itself out only inwardly, only in the souls of a generation, only in changing the meaning of worn-out symbols, in the dis-valuation of spiritual values.” Alas! In general, it is interesting to trace the mutual obsession between Russia and Germany: how preoccupied each was with the respective supposedly corrupting influences; how urgent the question of the national soul was felt to be. Many of the analyses seem a bit contradictory—Hesse actually inverts Dostoyevsky, for whom “everything is permitted” nihilism is a Western import for which Russian Orthodoxy is the cure—but there’s a striking intensity in the attempts to apprehend. Most of all, I’m struck by how anachronistic it all feels today: a country’s writers investigating the national soul and the nation’s fate through the lens of foreign literature. Which novels or works of art do we use to understand our contemporary issues? Should we be using such works? Do they inform or do they mislead? Today, the US worries a lot about China, but this mostly manifests at the level of trade balances, AI policy, and military prowess. We don’t seem to worry much about the spiritual force of Chinese ideals, and for all of the policy fractiousness, China continues to import and absorb American culture with enthusiasm that is mostly undimmed. There is a genre of jeremiad and cultural analysis in the US that rhymes a little with early twentieth century German criticism, but it today tends to be much more clinical, hinging around PISA scores, smartphones, lower fertility, and not around higher aspirations and ideals as such. So, to what extent should there be analyses of the national soul? And to what extent should they connect with major novels and works of art?

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

Remarkable assemblage in the new @WorksInProgMag: - @RobinRivaton and @bswud on how China's cities, and the competition between them, have driven its rise to techno-industrial preeminence, - @danwwang on Chinese and American second-tier cities, - @tylercowen on the food of Brazil, - @vpostrel on the invention of supermarkets, - @CharlesCMann on the discovery of porcelain, - @salonium on the myth of accidental scientific discovery, - Stephen Kotkin on Leninism's fatal flaw, - @owl_posting on biomedical hedge funds, - @PMArslanagic on the formula for lovable cities, - @pietergaricano on Ukraine as the future of war, - @PatRubenFitz on the Bronze Age Collapse, and - @SCP_Hughes on the social lives of hard-partying Victorian elites.

We're hosting a small event to discuss the latest advances in AI and biology this Friday evening, featuring @arcinstitute researchers and others. Apply if interested! forms.gle/1fh1GpHrimqu1H…

We're hosting a small event to discuss the latest advances in AI and biology this Friday evening, featuring @arcinstitute researchers and others. RSVP if interested! forms.gle/1fh1GpHrimqu1H…

Track $OUSD growth at ousd.fyi.

Open Standard, $OUSD, is now live! Open Standard is a new USD stablecoin with a very large network of participating partners (t.co/DLdavkVEL3). It's designed to be exceptionally secure, reliable, and developer-friendly. Importantly, most yield is shared directly with partners rather than being internalized by the stablecoin issuer. Stripe is adopting OUSD in a number of core product flows.

I've long wished that online mapping services were far richer and higher-density. They elide so much detail today! We have gloriously high-DPI screens... I want to wallow in cartographic filigree. AI of course now makes this possible: bayatlas.vercel.app

Very good post from @AtalantaArdenM on the role of suffering in art: aaatalanta.substack.com/p/human-frailty.

The small Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London's Postman's Park is quite moving: an assembly of earnest Arts and Crafts tiles commemorating people who died saving the lives of others. George Watts, the creator, in 1887: "My proposal, as you know, is plainly this: that the memory of the deeds of heroism constantly recurring in our everyday life should be perpetuated and honoured as such deeds should, for they illustrate the character of our people as a nation of great acts." And elsewhere: "It is a great pity that they should only receive the recognition of a newspaper paragraph, and be forgotten next day." I'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.

Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: t.co/x8pbpHLun7. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at t.co/YoZDuYbaBi.

🆕: @Meta and @stripe are partnering to make it easy for businesses to accept agentic payments using the @Muse Connector Platform. Learn more: • muse.ai/platform • docs.stripe.com/agentic-commer… • Email jweinstein@ / @jeff_weinstein

Very good piece, as usual, from @jburnmurdoch: ft.com/content/124c1c…

Based on this excellent paper from @Usama_Polani: siepr.stanford.edu/publications/w….

Tempo is compounding very quickly. Seeing a lot of new stablecoin + agent use-cases.

Given how wary academia (understandably) is of the effects of AI on many disciplines, it is particularly ironic that consuming its publications is so easy for the models (the world's knowledge is neatly serried in their pretraining corpora) and so cumbersome for most humans (with trenches of CAPTCHAs, accounts, and paywalls ensuring that only the unusually dedicated reader will ever make contact).

A quick EU founder survey: eusurvey.vercel.app.

I'm curious to read other stories from people who've scaled new businesses in Europe. (And if your experience has been positive, that's also useful to hear.) Feel free to email me: patrick@stripe.com.

Stimulating piece on Scottish education in @asteriskmgzn: t.co/jyTk8uTT1J. I suspect that discussions of canon, culture, and shared context to return to the fore in the coming years, as many skills, narrowly-construed, are ceded to AI, and as some of the excesses of de-Arnoldization, and the processes that Arendt described in her writing on education, start to recede. I’m curious on the causal linkage between PISA scores and the reforms he describes. It feels like a very exciting time to be a theorist of education, and I assume that the best work will come from surprising places.

Architects oppose the kinds of buildings that most people like. (I’ve wondered if one could further corroborate this by using Flickr/Instagram or similar to investigate the building traits that correlate with photo frequency.)

Chris Arnade's blog continues to be one of the very best: walkingtheworld.substack.com. (You can also follow him: @chris_arnade.)

In May 2025, Google disclosed that they were processing around 480T tokens per month. @OpenRouter is now crossing 500T per month. openrouter.ai/rankings

I've been enjoying Muse: muse.ai. Among many other things, you can use it to buy anywhere on the internet with @link.

New improvements coming to the @link agent wallet every week.

Ed West on the decline of reading: edwest.co.uk/p/doomscrollin….

Great essay from @clarabcollier: asteriskmag.com/issues/15/afte…. (You should subscribe to @asteriskmgzn, in addition to @WorksInProgMag of course. They have a very good print edition.)

Hmmm: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495636….

Excellent and important piece on clinical trials from @RuxandraTeslo: nytimes.com/2026/09/04/opi…

Tempo is growing very quickly and there are a lot of new use-cases coming online. Reach out to the team if you’re building with stablecoins.

Shopify is now available in projects.dev.

Overall, I’m very surprised at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack. It’s clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.

Between wallets for agents with @link (and @privy), MPP, Tempo, MCP, Stripe CLI, Agentic Commerce Suite, sandboxes, OpenRouter, Metronome/metered billing, Radar and distillation/token fraud, it turns out that "the economic infrastructure for AI" implicates a lot. Pretty much every layer of the Stripe stack is changing, and it’s a very good time to join if you want to build high-scale software that facilitates the practical deployment of this new intelligence.

Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.

Grok Bot can now purchase anywhere with @link. (If you haven't tried Grok Bot, you should. It's very good.)

Instinct and Stripe @link: text your agent to buy things around the internet.

Pretty neat: EURR, a new Euro-backed stablecoin, powered by Bridge Open Issuance.

Companies selling tokens are facing massive amounts of fraud these days. Stripe Radar is getting very, very good at blocking it.

Europe can have an amazing next few decades. I hope we can play a small role in making that more likely.

$ ori [your favorite harness] --model thinkingmachines/inkling:free (More: openrouter.ai/docs/guides/or….)

$ ori --model stealth/ox-alpha It's very impressive.

The 2026 @arcinstitute Virtual Cell Challenge just launched. The grand prize is $100,000, sponsored by @NVIDIA, @10xGenomics, and @UltimaGenomics. There's a lot of interest in virtual cells these days: ML models of cells that can complement wet lab experiments. (You'll always need the wet lab to validate results, of course. But ML models can in principle search far more efficiently.) A practical challenge in the field is that benchmarking is quite difficult: cells are very complicated, and it's not a priori obvious how to compare two different models. So, inspired by the CASP protein folding contest, we're running the Virtual Cell Challenge to create a standardized way for teams around the world to compare the efficacy of different approaches, to spread awareness of what works, and ultimately -- we hope -- to support faster progress overall. t.co/KMUYwidz7r

OpenRouter is joining Stripe: t.co/JY7bledeQD. As anyone who uses it knows, @OpenRouter is a truly delightful developer tool. It is by far the best way to use new models and manage multiple inference providers. OpenRouter is also playing an increasingly important role: in the future, every business will have to manage both revenue flows and token flows. OpenRouter is the world's leading token marketplace, helping businesses effectively allocate the new currency of intelligence capital. We think that there's a lot to build together.

New Aesthetics awardee.

I love agentic coding harnesses, but they shouldn't be primarily terminal-based. The terminal is great for quick and precise commands, but information density is extremely low and UI affordances are minimal. Maybe provision of TUIs is worthwhile for occasional use (when establishing a tunnel is too annoying, or something), but it feels very strange for this to be the default modality. It took a long time for dynamic language REPLs to break out of the terminal (Jupyter notebooks and similar); I hope we don't have to wait as long for the harnesses.

The World of Yesterday is amazing.

Fast Company interviews some New Aesthetics grantees: fastcompany.com/91581814/what-…

Sprawling set of new programmable money movement capabilities coming to Stripe — page below has the full roadmap. x.com/jrfarr/status/…

I only recently learned that this pedestrian bridge sits where San Francisco's first Hall of Justice did. Before/after below. I submit this in my evidence packet to anyone who maintains that nothing has gone wrong. x.com/SFGate/status/…

Here is San Francisco's current Hall of Justice, as an aside:

After developing the app locally (two prompts), deploying it took one prompt: > Push this to Vercel. Use Stripe Projects to create the account. Store the state somewhere safe. Claude chose to use Upstash as its datastore, which seems to be working well. x.com/patrickc/statu…

Made a quick survey about the economics of AI: next-five-years.vercel.app.

(Creating this took just a few minutes thanks to Vercel, Upstash, Claude, and Stripe Projects.)

As an aside and related to these topics: Ruskin (Nature of Gothic) is the best thing I've read so far this year.

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things: • Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be? • Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it. • It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development. • @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums? • I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated. • While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts. • We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.) • In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

What causes stagnation in the built world is one of the key questions of our era. In this month’s @WorksInProgMag, @SCP_Hughes argues quite convincingly that some of today's housing shortage is downstream of aesthetic choices. In particular, he shows that the abruptly ugly turn of postwar architecture triggered a regulatory backlash in the form of the conservation movement, which in turn stymied construction and development in urban environments across the West: t.co/KcotUv6V5j It may seem tendentious to flatly declare postwar construction ugly, but survey data is quite consistent on this point. Indeed, the sentiment is so widespread that it has spawned the Tartaria conspiracy theory. While the idea that people didn’t like the modernist construction of the postwar years is not by itself a new finding, Hughes teases out the particulars of the causality and shows how this popular rejection led to ensuing stagnation. This essay builds on Hughes’s prior work (“The beauty of concrete” and “Cheap ornament and status games”), and is I think an important contribution for anyone who cares about material progress.

Approaching 30k @mpp transactions per day. Machine-to-machine payments are starting to become a thing. mppscan.com/?d=0

The Pygmalion performance of Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine is amazing. t.co/2074HTOT1j

Seems very sensible. x.com/demishassabis/…

It's been interesting and puzzling to witness the problems with accuracy in UK economic statistics over the past few years. (See the links in the next tweet for more.) It seems that the Office for National Statistics, ONS, now struggles to effectively measure basic figures such as employment, trade, and inflation. This resulted in a quite scathing government report published last summer, where Robert Devereux, a former permanent secretary, concluded that "most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance." There's a lot of discussion about the travails facing the UK these days (including this big piece in The Atlantic a few weeks ago[1]), and the problems with the ONS feel like an unsettling microcosm of diffuse decline in broader institutional competence. Anyhow: at Stripe, we became curious about the UK's published entrepreneurship data. While we observe a boom in many parts of the world, official figures don't show a similar increase in the UK. In the latest Stripe Economics post, we dug into the data, and, as far as we can tell, the official figures are probably misleading. The good and the bad news (mostly good, I think!) is that the UK is almost certainly witnessing an unmeasured boom in entrepreneurship: t.co/R7oTZNmxc6 UK-specific issues aside, I suspect that this measurement question is illustrative of forthcoming econometric challenges. Keeping the world's macro indicators up-to-date in response to the faster-than-usual changes wrought by AI will be both increasingly difficult and increasingly important in the coming years. [1] t.co/OAnwRmpyON

On the ONS: • ft.com/content/fe043c… • ft.com/content/5fd0a7… • ft.com/content/5bd04b… • blog.ons.gov.uk/2026/06/19/lea… • bbc.com/news/articles/…

I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (t.co/1tSgGbSLxM) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: t.co/5ED9TM7lJB. I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.

Links post from @RichardHanania, noting: "A very high portion of the links comes from Works in Progress, which I think has become in essence the most must-read thing on the internet." richardhanania.com/p/indigenous-a…

Delighted to partner with Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Google, and many others, to introduce Open Standard, a new stablecoin designed for scale: joinopenstandard.com.

@Nicolas_Colin x.com/bfmtv/status/2…

@Nicolas_Colin x.com/andrewhammel1/… x.com/andrewhammel1/…

New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur stripeeconomics.com/p/the-age-of-t…

New project: interceptfund.com. More: interceptfund.substack.com/p/ending-respi….

I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.

Very early experiment but I think this will be cool. stripe.directory.

Vídeo

A very kind endorsement of @WorksInProgMag from the peerless and inspiring @kevin2kelly. recomendo.com/p/works-in-pro… You can (and should!) subscribe over at worksinprogress.co/print.

I just visited Paris. The city seemed to be in particularly radiant shape this time. • It got me thinking about how many of the nicest built environments in the world standardize materials rather than form. Jerusalem's stone regulation makes it much prettier than Tel Aviv. Similarly, rules in the Charleston, the Cotswolds, and Sea Ranch leave a lot of flexibility in shape, but tightly restrict materials in a way that yields cohesion. In Paris's case, there are of course also some rules around form, but the consistency of the limestone (and zinc) is very pleasant. • I hadn’t before internalized that central Paris is unique for the fraction of its building stock that is traditional. There are of course some modern buildings, such as Centre Pompidou and the new facade at La Samaritaine, but they are rare and typically dramatic. Most pleasant old cities (such as London) contain more of a mixture. • Relatedly, is Haussmannian Paris the finest example of the central planning that Scott decries? "By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation." And is the late 19th century the last time you could have done this well, immediately before the corruptions of modernism? I guess Chicago was later, but Paris certainly comes close. • From a book I picked up: In a letter of 1886 to the Ministry of Public Works, Charles Garnier, architect of the neo-Baroque Paris Opéra, wrote, “The Metropolitan Railroad, in the eyes of most Parisians, will only be excused if it rejects absolutely all industrial character so as to be completely a work of art. Paris must not be made into a factory, it must stay a museum.” Are there elites anywhere in the world today who would reject something in the physical world unless it was a work of art? One artist recently commented to me that late 19th century France had the most educated visual culture among its elites in human history. This observation struck me a few times as I traveled around. • I am curious what those who defend modern architecture say about central Paris. Do they think that one could in principle have a place built of modern architecture that people would find as attractive and that would bring joy to so many? Do they think that such a place exists in actuality today? If not, why not? Or is the goal of having somewhere pretty and attractive in their eyes itself ignoble and saccharine? To me Paris feels like a challenge of the whole project. • Walking past the Louvre at night, I was struck by its austerity and severity. It made me reflect on how Parisians in 1700 might have felt as they took it in, and the subjugation that has been associated with social structures of prior eras. (Maybe this is on my mind partly as a result of reading Charles Taylor.) It made me wonder if I should be slightly more sympathetic to modernism for embodying a sense of individual freedom and joy. The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais was quite a contrast. • Perhaps heretical, but Notre Dame is just not especially impressive as a cathedral, especially inside, though the restoration seems to have been excellently done, and is a terrific achievement. Overall, Lincoln cathedral (say) is much more attractive in my view. Maybe I need to read Hugo to appreciate it better. (Hugo apparently was responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in Gothic architecture. A good example, I guess, of art driving life.) • The Renoir exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay was interesting for its emphasis on egalitarian and open relations between men and women, not something observed everywhere in the world at the time. "At the same time delicate and modest – neither moralising nor Dionysian." I thought of @_alice_evans and her work. • There are now so many bikes in Paris. It means you have to pay very active attention as a pedestrian, but is overall a big improvement. Rue de Rivoli is now dominated by the pleasant whirr of bicycles. I mostly got around this way. • The Musée Quai Branly is very interesting – it’s the best tour of the world in a single compressed space that I know of. Most of the works are not impressive as such, but the concentrated breadth is great. The Ethiopian illustrated Gospels were very charming. • Maybe my imagination, but there seemed to me to be a third fewer brasseries than on prior trips. Overall, the food was good, but not better than what you get at good restaurants in the US. The median in Paris is definitely still better, though. • The Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais was pleasant. It mostly reminded me of the observation that it is difficult to rank artists but easy to rank the work of a given artist. The Blue Nudes and The Sheaf are just very obviously among Matisse’s best work. • The Michelangelo x Rodin exhibition at the Louvre was excellent, most of all for making clear how direct the artistic lineage is. Given the 300 year interlude, we should probably be more optimistic about the prospects for revival of the best of the visual arts. I hadn't before realized that Michelangelo's career spanned 74 years. It’s easy to focus on youth and prodigious genius, but maybe enduring genius should be more central. May we all aim to be useful and productive for a large majority of a century! In this vein, David Hockney, RIP, also just cleared the 70 year career mark. • The Louvre is quite hot; far hotter than an American museum would be. Presumably because of EU/French air conditioning laws? (26 degree regulatory minima, supposedly.) • Overall, central Paris feels like it's in very good shape. Things are generally quite clean and well-maintained. Not too much graffiti (though some buildings, such as the Louvre, are very overdue for power washing.) Nowhere felt unsafe. (Given that it’s been ruled continuously by socialists since 2001, one wonders why it has fared better than many coastal cities in America. The LLMs claim that it's because much of the funding is central and because the police report centrally, not to the mayor.) Overall, is central Paris the greatest single artistic achievement in the world? That is what I came away wondering. Pictured: Ethiopian prayer scroll; Iranian qalamkari; Renoir; af Klint.

Being comically maladapted to sunny climes, I have in endless and often unsuccessful pursuit of self-defense experimented with a sprawling battery of different sunscreens. This one is by far the best I’ve found: t.co/JpGfY3L5sY. (You need to illicitly procure the non-US version; the FDA valiantly shields us from its benefits due to their restrictive and seldom-updated set of permissible sunscreen ingredients.)

The @Tempo mainnet launched 93 days ago. Quick summary of the current state: • Run rate payment volume is around $3 billion. There's a long way to go, but it's cool to see real usage already emerging. (It took Stripe a lot longer than 93 days to get to $3 billion.) • As a blockchain, we obviously don't know about all the different use-cases. (Please tell us if you're doing something cool with Tempo!) Larger companies using Tempo include @Deel, which is using Tempo to pay out to their vast network of contractors, and @Meta, which is using it via @Link for global payouts. There are a bunch of other large companies working on Tempo integrations that'll be announced soon. • Internally, developing on Tempo has been fun, and Tempo is now Stripe's default blockchain for new features. • On the AI side of things, there appear to be around 1,000 active services selling to agents via the Machine Payments Protocol (@mpp). There's a useful directory of available services at t.co/fAZ5iA5nZc. 570 unique agents, for example, seem to have purchased from @ExaAILabs, and 332 from @openweather. I don't know how long it'll take for this use-case to become big, but it seems all-but inevitable that it will within a few years. • Today, @Stripe, @Visa, and @StanChart are running Tempo validators. Validation will become more decentralized over time. • The Tempo team is building a lot of new protocol functionality. For example, privacy zones, receive policies, and virtual addresses. (Details for all on the Tempo blog: t.co/jE7ltNIaj2.) In general, our belief is that there's a lot of functionality to be built at the blockchain level to make higher-level applications easy and performant. The original thesis behind Tempo was that both AI and stablecoins would stretch blockchains in new ways, with need for privacy, fees denominated/payable in stablecoins, batch transactions, microtransactions, faster confirmations, and so forth. Overall, this still seems like the right set of bets, and the agentic stuff is happening somewhat faster than I was expecting. "1M stablecoin TPS, with the vast majority from agents" still seems like the right north star.

Very much enjoyed this piece in the latest @WorksInProgMag about how Alberta became a rat-free sanctuary and the only significant human-inhabited place on earth that is free of them. Excellent "you can just do things" energy. "William Lobay, a crop protection supervisor at the Alberta Department of Agriculture, came up with the idea of a buffer zone focused on the area of prairie and parkland that was most vulnerable to penetration. In late 1950, Albertan officials approved his Rat Control Zone, a roughly 600-by-29-kilometer strip along the part of its eastern border with Saskatchewan. In the zone, William Lobay and his colleagues surveyed cargo and vehicles that entered the province, and inspected vulnerable sites like farms, grain elevators, feed stacks, barns, sheds, and abandoned buildings, where food and shelter made rat establishment most likely." t.co/t8sGM5BTJI

Congratulations to @eoghan, @destraynor, and the whole Fin team! x.com/eoghan/status/…

Delighted to partner with @LloydsBank to bring Stripe’s capabilities to millions of new businesses. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

I want some kind of LLM workflow tool. • Ability to manage a set of input files (Markdown or similar), plus other general-purpose context. • With real-time collaboration. (And maybe some concept of snapshots or VCS integration.) • And the ability to create/manage a inference

Sad to hear that Ada's Technical Books in Seattle is closing this week -- it's a wonderful bookstore. I always found something obscure but interesting when I visited. adasbooks.com

Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of

I’ve been struck by this phenomenon in much of the discussion around Hormuz. Who exactly should one listen to for systems as complex and reflexive as energy? (Evidently not IEA.) Is it even possible to make meaningful predictions for out-of-distribution shocks like strait closure x.com/lugaricano/sta…

Tyler and I just published a list of the recipients of the New Aesthetics grants: newaesthetics.art/grants. Thank you very much to all who applied. There were far more applications than we expected. We funded 28 grantees and are excited to see what they create. My reflections on

Interesting @DouthatNYT on @nanransohoff's essay, @WillManidis's pieces, and (in passing) the call for New Aesthetics: nytimes.com/2026/05/23/opi….

Cool release from @p0. I think this use-case (agents paying content creators for access via @mpp) will be very big. Micropayment walls haven't worked (as Clay Shirky anticipated many years ago) because of human cognitive overhead, but agents can make arbitrarily granular x.com/p0/status/2056…